Poetry is what gets lost in translation-Robert Frost

January 11, 2014

Conversations In The Cathedral

Mario Vargas Llosa has a way of exploring the tapestry of life. For example, Conversations In The Cathedral (1969) can be described as a conversation between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their lives and of the overall degradation and frustration of living in a dictatorship. But it is an epic, sprawling novel that is also about families, the search for identity and a place in society, love, death, life as a journalist, corruption, politics, and more. that being said, I found the first third of the novel challenging as I tried to piece together who was who and what was going on in the narrative, but once Llosa gets going, he is a master storyteller and I found this to be another gem in his oeuvre.